Culture Friday: What kids really need

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, August 8th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday and John Stonestreet is back. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good morning, and welcome back, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good to be back! Thanks so much.

EICHER: Glad to have you. John, a controversial bill is now sitting in the California state Senate—one that critics say could strip away parental rights and open the door to child trafficking.

It’s called the Family Preparedness Plan Act of 2025—Assembly Bill 495. It’s pitched as a compassionate safeguard for children whose parents are suddenly detained or deported. So you can see what’s driving the push for it.

But opponents warn the bill would allow virtually anyone claiming a “mentoring relationship” with a child to assume legal authority—no court order, no parental consent, no background check required.

In Southern California, Pastor Jack Hibbs is sounding the alarm. He’s hoping to rally at least 5,000 people to the state Capitol about ten days from now—and his message is blunt. Here he is:

HIBBS: I have to tell you, if this bill passes, I’m going to ask you to leave the state of California. You’re going to need to pack up, and you’re going to have to get out. You got to get out. You got to run with your kids. You got to go. If this bill passes, you gotta go. I would not subject my child to one second in this public school system with this new law, AB 495.

John, you’ve said something similar about your own state—that if your kids were younger, you’d not stay in Colorado over laws that undermine parental authority. So this may resonate with you.

Is it really this bad?

STONESTREET: Yeah, it is really that bad, and it’s really this bad in Colorado. It’s not just because there are laws that undermine parental authority. There are laws that are actually inserting state officials and government entities in between kids and parents, and not just undermining parental authority, removing parental authority, replacing parental authority.

Look, it’s just an amazing thing how they title these bills. What about this is preparing a family for anything? Again, it’s a replacement of a family.

The fact that you’re talking about that this applies to those whose parents might be deported, and that this is really an immigration issue, without drawing any lines, for example, between citizens and non-citizens, without drawing any lines between which government officials—so now you have basically carte blanche potential for school officials. Which, in California, for the record, they already have done.

One of the first stories I heard about a government official, basically over the gender issue, removing a kid from her parents and actually forbidding her mom to see her daughter unless she never talked about Christianity, faith, or going to church—I mean, that was in California, and that was just done bureaucratically, right through the unchecked power of state officials there when it comes to child protective services.

We would not still be in Colorado, given the language that is already used now. We kind of think, well, look, is there a role then that people like us have to play in keeping this harm away from other people and other citizens?

You know, Pastor Hibbs is exactly right that this is a big deal. What he’s really reflecting on here is just how the vibe shift that so many people are talking about—you know, kind of the political new day—that some of these ideas that were basically out of control on a national level, that have been turned around in recent days.

This isn’t the same thing as cultural renewal. This is not like these things have stopped. Blue states are getting bluer. Red states are getting redder. What “bluer” means and what “redder” means is becoming more and more clear. There are divides on fundamental issues.

I just keep going back to—you have people now in power passing laws where, looking at the exact same thing—so-called “gender affirming care.” One side calls it mutilation. The other side calls it life-saving. I mean, we’re just on such different pages, and the policies are reflecting how different these worldviews are.

EICHER: John, a disturbing story out of Pennsylvania is raising urgent questions about the state’s surrogacy laws—and about the broader breakdown of protections for children.

A registered sex offender recently obtained custody of a newborn through a private surrogacy arrangement. The offender we’re talking about was convicted of soliciting a teenage student while working as a high school teacher, so that’s who we’re talking about. But because Pennsylvania law doesn’t require background checks or court oversight for these contracts, there was nothing to prevent it.

Is this just a loophole, like an unintended consequence, or do you see a broader issue here?

STONESTREET: This kind of thing, where adults get what they want no matter what is best for children, is not a bug of artificial reproductive technologies as the industry is built. It’s a feature.

If you want to talk about the ideological foundations of it, it’s the idea of birth control. This now becomes basically another process, another technology, another thing that will provide for us what we want.

There was a remarkable piece in The Free Press a week or so ago by Madeleine Kearns, talking about her own journey through infertility and how she was treated—not through IVF, which almost all the doctors had told her was her only option—but through a medical practice that is emerging, in which some of these things that have rendered women infertile are able to be treated and reversed. It’s been an incredible health benefit for her, according to her article.

It struck me as I was seeing that article and comparing it to this story, how in vitro fertilization, for example—but really surrogacy and the larger artificial reproductive technology movement—regardless of the ethical challenges of the practice itself, is what the medicine actually is aiming at doing.

She talked about a doctor who, for the first time, was interested in treating this condition in her body. The other medical professionals who said IVF was her only option—for them, the problem they were trying to treat is that she couldn’t get what she wanted in terms of a child.

There is a big, big difference if the purpose of medicine is to give everyone what they want. So if you want to have sex and you don’t want to have a baby—birth control. If you want to have a baby but you’re not able to—IVF.

If you think about it, IVF does not treat a woman’s infertility. IVF is a workaround to a woman’s infertility. She remains infertile. But there are treatments that can actually help.

Here you have the ultimate example of that, because all of this is done in the context of the sexual revolution, which has become this movement to enable, at every level of society, sexual autonomy.

So if two men, who have chosen to have an intentionally sterile union, cannot have a child that they want, let’s call it infertility. It’s not infertility. The men aren’t infertile. The process is sterile. That’s two completely different things.

But again, this industry is about giving adults what they want. When you are all about giving adults what they want, it’s just kind of a—gosh—it’s a footnote whether one of the adults that wants something is a registered sex offender or not, isn’t it? That’s not really relevant to the whole process.

That’s what I mean. This is a feature of the whole industry: to give adults exactly what they want. That is not something that will ever be aligned with the rights and well-being of children.

BROWN: John, for decades there’s been a narrative of decline of marriage in America—rising divorce, single parenthood, fewer people tying the knot. But a new report from the Institute for Family Studies suggests that narrative may be changing. This is Brad Wilcox’s group, a powerful expert on marriage and family.

The study is titled “Is Marriage Back? Divorce Is Down, Family Stability Is Up.”

Here are a few key takeaways:

• Divorce is now at a 50-year low.

• More kids are being raised by married parents.

• The biggest improvements in family stability are among black and lower-income families.

• But while marriage is rebounding for children, it’s still flatlining for adults—especially younger adults.

So, John, I don’t really want to ask whether you’re in agreement with Brad Wilcox, but I am curious about one of the findings that the marriage comeback is benefiting kids even more than the adults raising them—why do you suppose that is?

STONESTREET: Well, look, at the end of the day, this is fascinating to watch. Hopefully, this will be part of the vibe shift—one that will take it beyond just kind of rejecting what’s bad, to reattaching ourselves as individuals in a society to things that are actually good.

That gets at the heart of this. There’s nuances here, and there’s details here, and there’s demographic differences—whether you’re talking about this age group or that age group.

What all of this comes back to, and the reason that this is good for kids, is that there’s been a cultural lie that has permeated the sexual revolution from the beginning. There was no better example of it than with no-fault divorce and also intentionally single homes.

You might remember that ridiculous moment in American political history where a real-life political candidate, Dan Quayle, had a public spat with someone who didn’t actually exist in real life—Murphy Brown.

You remember the Dan Quayle–Murphy Brown thing? This idea was: if adults want it—and it goes right back to what we were talking about in the previous answer—if adults want it, they should be able to get it.

Okay, so that’s where we’re at. The form of that myth is, “Oh, well, kids need loving parents, not a mom and a dad.” Or, “Well, if two loving parents are good for kids, think how good four will be, or five will be,” in order to endorse polyamorous parenting.

That was said back then when there was no data. The data is overwhelming. Brad Wilcox has been one of the ones that’s been most public in sharing the data.

But the definitive work of the legacy of divorce on children and the importance of marriage for children is The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce by Judith Wallerstein, who studied this issue for 40 years. For zero years was it considered good. She compared the devastation that divorce carries for children to something akin to the catastrophic nature of the Holocaust for children.

It wasn’t that bad, because nothing is, but the closest you get is that. In other words, this all points to something, and that is that marriage is built into the fabric of the universe.

It’s not a social construct that now that we’re more tolerant of alternative sexual relationships, we can socially construct a new definition of marriage and therefore, by doing that, rework socially what we think a parent should be.

All the data has pointed for a long time that kids do better when they are raised in a home with biological, married mom and dad. All the data has pointed sometimes to the fact that moms mom and dads dad—and dads don’t mom, and moms don’t dad. Moms and dads bring unique things.

So when you talk about married, biological mom and dad—every adjective there that you take away decreases what’s good for children.

That’s what this continues to reflect. I think there is a way that you can suppress reality, and when it comes to marriage and sexuality and children, we’ve suppressed it for a really long time.

But as one of my apologist friends likes to say, reality is like the beach ball. You can push it under the pool, but it keeps coming back up. If you’re trying to push six or seven or eight beach balls under the water, you’re not going to be successful.

Reality wins. That’s really what marriage, family, parenting is. These are created norms. They’re not socially constructed things. They’re realities.

BROWN: John Stonestreet, president of the Colson center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, thanks again, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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